Are we Facebook’s guinea pigs?

Don’t be so sure. Facebook is using you for its experiments, as the recent row around a rather secret study supported by the social media giant suggests.

A recent study conducted by researchers from Facebook and Cornell University, published in the prestigious US journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that those who get to see sad or bad posts continuously on Facebook are more likely to feel sad or bad.

The same way, if you see happy or cheerful posts frequently, your mood can swing to the realm of happiness. This means emotions can be “contagious”.

Yes, we know such things happen offline. But this study shows it happens online as well. It also means you don’t need to interact physically to influence someone’s emotions.

Well, there are certain things which are fairly uncool about it, as the media later found out. As part of the experiment, Facebook data scientists manipulated the news feeds of nearly 7,00,000 Facebook accounts in such a way that some of them saw more negative posts from friends and some received only cheerful posts. The experiment hid a “ small percentage” of emotional words in the news feeds of these users to test what effect it had on the statuses or ‘likes’ they posted later. The experiment was done over one week in January 2012.

No. Human rights activists and some data experts say that this was a breach of ethics. Technology companies are not supposed to play such psychological games with people’s minds. And Facebook should apologise because tampering with emotions is a risky affair. For instance, mood disorders are behind nearly 60 per cent of suicides globally. Research has found that even mild depression can raise the risk of heart failure by 5 per cent. If there are serious mood swings, it can lead to a heart attack in 40 per cent of the cases.

Exactly. That’s why privacy rights activists want an apology from Facebook and want technology companies to stop all such clandestine activities using our data. The charges against Facebook snowballed into a bigger controversy when Cornell University initially said the study was funded by the US Army Research Office. The institution later denied this.

Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, one of the three authors who wrote the study, issued an apology for any anxiety the study may have caused. He says the study was carried out because they “cared about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product”.

That said, Facebook doesn’t feel it has done anything grossly illegal. In fact, everyone signing up on the social network agrees to its data use policy which has a line saying your data could be used for “research”.

But not many are buying the logic. And Facebook might land in some legal trouble elsewhere. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK says it might probe whether Facebook breached data protection laws during the study.

Don’t be so paranoid. You can always delete your account or move to platforms that offer more transparent environments — though that’s tough to come by. But let’s hope the likes of Facebook and Google will be able to understand the writing on the wall and what it means to breach the trust of their users.

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